How to Drive Traffic to Your Blog (EXPLODE your Shares on Social Media)

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If you're wondering how to drive traffic to your blog, make sure you boost your social media shares. In this post, Christopher Jan Benitez shares his tips on how to skyrocket your blog traffic by placing some serious emphasis on growing your social media shares.

Care to Share?

The phrase “sharing is caring” rings true in our everyday lives.

Our ability to empathize with the less fortunate compels us to donate stuff we no longer use to them.

Sharing food with your friends and family means that you care enough for them to partake in your blessings.

In blogging, sharing also means caring, but it’s the other way around.

"Sharing is caring" is true in everyday life, but for a #blogger it's the other way around.

Click to Tweet

Instead of the blogger doing the sharing, it's the readers who have the power to share your content.

One of the most common ways that they can share your post is through social media. They can simply tweet or like your blog posts on Twitter or Facebook, which means that they care enough to share your post with others.

Just as important, every social share adds up to your total tally, which serves as proof to readers that people found your content helpful.

Marketers and bloggers use interstitials such as opt-in forms to create irresistible CTAs on their site. However, at the expense of this goal, you potentially annoy readers with how you set up your opt-in boxes to appear. Readers normally are not big fans appreciate opt-in forms

While Google’s effort only applies on mobile, you should take this as a sign to learn how to use opt-in forms the right way. At the same time, it encourages you to think outside of the box by finding ways on how to attract and engage their audience through their content.

A non-disruptive alternative to opt-in forms is gated or locked content.

You can lock a portion of your blog post, if not the whole thing. For readers to unlock the gated content, all they need to do is share your content on social media.

The key to effective locking of your content is to incentivize readers for sharing your content on social media. At the same time, you need to lock the juiciest and most helpful content to compel readers to unlock your content by sharing it.

One of the best WordPress plugins for locking content is Social Locker. You can choose from different attractive designs to get the attention of users and share your blog post.

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3. Making “tweetable” quotes

As a blogger, your concern is to be read by your audience and make an impact in their lives. By writing about things that matter to them, you have the potential to change their lives for the better.

Therefore, you need to make every word that you type count. Clarity in your writing is most important if you want to communicate your ideas effectively.

One way of doing this is to create tweetable quotes on your blog post.

Quotes are normally short and sweet, making them easy to share on social media. People like bite-size information, which makes tweetable quotes a great tactic to drive up your social shares.

Tweetable quotes is an incredibly worthwhile functionality for you to implement if you're really dedicated to learning how to drive traffic to your blog via social media. When you make your writing clear, concise, and influential, you increase the likelihood that your readers will be inspired to share your content via these social share functions on your site.​

Of all social media platforms, Twitter lets you share your quotes from your blog post. While there are some WordPress plugins that perform this function, Social Warfare lets you choose a design that will help your quotes stand out from the content.

In a blog post, you can take some of the most important lines and feature them as a "click to tweet." You can also create quotes that summarize a section in your article.

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4. Promoting your post like hell!

Learning how to drive traffic to your blog means nothing if you're not willing to put in the legwork. As mentioned earlier, your post won’t promote itself

You need to do the legwork of manually sharing them on different online channels so your audience can read your content.

In fact, you’ll probably have to spend more time promoting your post than writing it. Applying the Pareto Principle in this context, you need to spend 4x more promoting your content. If you wrote your post in a day, for example, then you need to spend the next four days sharing it.

Aside from driving social shares to your post, the principle works as a way to build for an audience who will regularly visit your blog for updates. Making the effort of marketing your blog posts will help you attract people who are looking for your content and might stay with you for good.

If you are a blogger who only focuses on the writing aspect, promotions can be overbearing. However, blogging is more than just writing if you want more social shares for your blog, let alone have a successful blog.

For starters, you can read this post that I wrote in which I compiled the best places where you can submit your posts to online groups and communities. By submitting your blog posts to the featured site, you also get in touch with like-minded people in your field. Take this opportunity to network with them as well in the hopes of turning them into avid readers of your blog.

You can also spend time tackling some blogger outreach (reaching out to influencers in your niche), making connections, and sharing your stuff.

Once you have manually submitted your blog post to groups and and reached out to influencers, you can move up to automating your social sharing process.

If you have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and others, then you should be promoting your content on those sites. While it's possible to share your posts on social media multiple times, manually sharing them is a painstakingly repetitive task.

Thankfully, you can use a tool like CoSchedule that you can access from your WordPress dashboard to schedule your social media posting. You can share your blog posts the whole year if you want so you can maximize the traffic for your posts.

To learn how CoSchedule works as a social scheduling tool along with its other features, click here.

Wrapping it up

It takes a lot of moving parts for your blog post to reach hundreds, if not thousands, of social shares. However, it all starts on how you promote it to your audience.

By referring to the tactics I shared above, you can boost your social shares, which in turn can help increase your authority and influence in your niche.

While the shares are just numbers, social proof goes a long way in shaping the perception of your audience about your blog post and making them care.

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Christopher Jan Benitez is a professional freelance writer who provides small businesses with content that aims to increase engage and conversion. For more information about his writing services,click here. You can also follow him onFacebookandTwitter.

Christopher Jan Benitez

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